spinflip @spinflip@qoto.org

@freemo looks like there's a guy trying to advertise some sort of reactionary radio show: romegeorgiaman (lots of toots in the federated TL). Is advertising of that sort allowed here?

@phyu I'd say a good 70%+ of Mastodon users are communists, yes

@QuentinMann nationalise it

@liamvhogan I wonder if this rise of this wide-but-shallow access to culture will eventually lead to popular artists coming out of niche genres? I kind of like the idea of a charismatic Mongolian throat-singer topping the hottest 100 because listeners no longer have a developed idea of what chart-topping songs are supposed to sound like

@InvaderXan that sounds great! I'll look into Sunvault, and hopefully there will be more in the genre soon. I've been feeling a need for 21st-century utopian fiction for years, and solarpunk looks pretty close to what I've been hoping for

@natecull oh man, ELNs in academia are such a clusterfuck. There's resistance to the idea before you start, the existing ELNs are almost all proprietary with zero interoperability, and the stuff we want to store is ridiculously diverse: small machine-readable files, massive files that can only be read by specific commercial software, copious notes handwritten on fumehood sashes and physical samples…

@InvaderXan after your thread on art nouveau last night: what *is* solarpunk? The concept seems to make sense intuitively, but does it actually exist? Are there any archetypical solarpunk works you can recommend?

@porsupah as to recording: I like the idea, but that kind of plays into why I've been thinking about our disconnect. It's easy to imagine a conversation along the linea of "So, you're… really old. I bet you have some interesting stories from a long time ago. Would you like to talk about how things were… different then to how they are now?", followed by awkward silences.

@porsupah that might be the case, but I'm sure you could have found people in the 1960s marvelling at their grandparents' discomfort around electricity and television. Many of those bookers are just as unfamiliar with the internet now. Web 1.0 in the early 2000s already feels like a lifetime ago (imo part of the success of Mastodon is due to it feeling a bit like that era): it seems likely that within my lifetime, the internet will change in ways I'll find alienating and hard to accept

@InvaderXan

I haven't actually read this, but it's been on the list for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_from_Nowhere

@InvaderXan as well as being disgustingly talented, William Morris was explicitly a radical socialist and writer of utopian works. I don't know how accessible his works were to 19th century workers in reality, but it's hard to fault his motives and objectives.

@kara@witchcraft.cafe I wouldn't even call Tarkovsky's Stalker horror, tbh. That said, it's a lot harder to build mysterious dread in a game without providing actual horror elements: it's hard for mystery to survive contact with the player doing dumb shit to see what happens, and facing no consequence.

I only played through it once yeeears ago, but from memory Penumbra: Overture did this quite well

@kara@witchcraft.cafe I'm trying and failing to think of any games that have managed to capture that vibe. Myst, maybe?

Idk. I feel bad for my grandparents spending a lot of time sitting around at home drinking tea, doing sudoku, and watching the BBC in the evenings. They have friends in the village so aren't hugely isolated, but living with such a low level of information flow feels like it would drive me insane (of course, Being Online is hardly a good thing for sanity either).

I can't help but wonder if that's a result of one-time c20th cultural change, or if I'll be just as relatively isolated in my old age.

So much of my life experience comes from being Extremely Online: dumb memes, weird communities that fit into too narrow a niche to ever self-assemble offline in a single location, a faith in my ability to access almost all human knowledge from the device in my pocket. It's genuinely fucking weird to spend time with a guy who sees all that shit as inscrutably alien, but who can talk about the time a V1 flew over his head while he was cycling home and took out the row of houses opposite.